


The Accidental Father

by dearlydraupadi



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Adoption, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fake Marriage, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Families of Choice, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-16 18:40:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9285008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearlydraupadi/pseuds/dearlydraupadi
Summary: When Luke calls CPS on an unattended minor, he accidentally puts himself smack in the middle of a custody battle. He'd let it be, but this kid seems to really need his help. So with Lorelai Gilmore posing as his "fiancee" and Rory Gilmore jokingly calling him Dad, Luke does the only thing he can think of: petition the courts for custody of one Paris Geller, age twelve.This is a weird plot bunny and I have no regrets.





	1. The Kid in the Park

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: While I do work in social services and actually do know how CPS works, I am choosing to mostly ignore/abridge that for convenience' sake. Suffice it to say that this is grossly inaccurate and I should be ashamed of myself.

There was a little girl sitting on a park bench and Luke Danes was pretty sure he shouldn’t be paying as much attention to her as he was. It was the small town in him, he knew. Seeing an unattended child made him wonder if the kid’s parents were around and if they needed help. But this was Hartford, the (relatively) big city. He didn’t know this kid, didn’t know her parents, didn’t know if she was supposed to be on that bench or if she was cutting class or if class was even happening that day. Was this spring vacation? Luke sure as hell didn’t know.

Still, he looked over at the girl. She was small but probably not as young as she looked, he concluded, wearing a private school uniform and watching every adult going past with keen eyed contempt. Also she was glaring at him, which made him look away quickly, then look back. Nope, still glaring.

Sighing and tossing his sandwich wrapper in the trash, Luke got up and walked over to her. He felt like a giant looming over her park bench and he could practically feel the rich nannies in the park dialing stranger danger into their phones, but he had to ask. “Hey kid, you lost or something?”

The kid, who might have been as old as twelve but was pretty dang short for troubles, spat back at him, “What, looking for someone to be the Jodie Foster to your Travis Bickle?”

He rubbed a hand over his jaw so he wasn’t smiling. This kid was like a surlier, smaller, angrier Lorelai. “Pretty sure you’re a little young to have seen Taxi Driver.”

“And you’re a little old to be creeping on kids in the park.”

“So there’s an appropriate age to creep on kids?” His hand was barely hiding the smile now. The kid was funny, he’d give her that, even if she still hadn’t so much as dropped the glare.

“I’m not getting in your van for sex is what I’m saying,” she said, primly crossing her legs and folding her arms. “So you can buzz off before I call the police.”

“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands. “But where are your parents or nanny or whatever? Aren’t you supposed to be in school today?”

Her glare faltered at this, caught out. Her arms tightened around her as she said, “School was cancelled, Bickle. A pipe burst.”

“Huh,” he said, finally sitting down next to her, but keeping a healthy distance. “Guess those fancy private schools get maintenance problems just like everyone else.” He chanced a look back over at her and sighed internally. “But why aren’t you at home then?”

She did not respond except to say, “I bet the woman over there thinks you’re trying to kidnap me.”

Luke privately agreed. Still. There was no way this kid was supposed to be where she was, and at the very least he was going to make sure she called whoever should have picked her up. He wasn’t always the most kid friendly guy in the world, but he wasn’t about to leave some random girl sitting in a park because, what? No one had come to school to get her?

Oh. No one had come to get her.

“I’m Luke,” he said. “You got someone I should call right now?”

She turned her eye lasers back in his direction. “Luke is probably short for Lucas, isn’t it? Did you know that Lucas is a very common name among career criminals? Apparently criminal names have strong ‘k’ sounds in them. Your parents must not have liked you very much to give you a criminal name.”

“Your parents must not have liked you very much to leave you sitting on this park bench talking to strangers.”

Okay. So maybe he wasn’t really used to talking to children. 

While she pretended she wasn’t crying and he pretended he hadn’t just made her cry, Luke considered his options. He could try to call her parents, he guessed, but he didn’t even know the kid’s name and it wasn’t looking good for them actually coming to get her. He could take her with him, but that looked like the short way to a long sentence in maximum security. Or he could call child protective services. Which had the plus side of being legal and probably what he was supposed to do in a situation like this, but the downside of making him feel a little bit like a narc. He squashed that feeling as best he could.

He clapped a clumsy hand on her shoulder and stood up. “See you around, Jodie,” he said, waving a hand and reaching covertly for his cell phone. 

“Paris,” she said, quietly. He looked back and nodded at her. 

“See you later, Paris.”

And then he called her in.

*

He didn’t actually leave after that, of course. Instead, feeling like even more of a creep than he had sitting on a park bench next to a (probably) twelve year old, he sat in his truck and waited for child services to come. He didn’t think that Paris would make a run for it, if for no other reason than she wasn’t expecting them. She didn’t seem like a usual case and while he’d bet this wasn’t the first time it’d happened, she lacked the suspicious air of a kid who’d already been through the system.

He knew what that looked like a little too well.

So Luke sat and waited, drinking crappy overpriced tea in the cab of his truck while he pretended not to be kind of sort of stalking a child. A child who was…reading some book clearly too old and mature for her. Seriously, it looked like it was a thousand pages long and if this was a kid who’d already seen Taxi Driver, he didn’t have high hopes that it was just an Anne of Green Gables master set. 

Before he’d finished his second cup of tea (he’d bought four just to be safe and had the carryout tray innocently in the passenger seat like someone who was definitely not a serial killer), a squad car pulled up, and two bored looking officers stepped out. They sauntered in the kid’s direction, taking care to split up and corner her before she could startle, then carefully led her over to the car. So all right then. His job as a concerned citizen was all done. Luke Danes to the rescue and that was that. He patted himself on the back a little inside.

Until she reached the curb and happened to look directly at him, her eyes blazing and a certain “I will rain hellfire down on you for what you’ve done” expression on her face.

Luke carefully put the car into gear and started the engine. This might not have been his best idea ever.

*

By the time he got home forty minutes later, he was absolutely sure that not only had this been a bad idea, it had been up there with letting Liz bleach his hair in high school and not telling Lorelai how he felt when he first met her. So, pretty bad. Top three bad decisions.

His phone blinked with missed calls, both from Lorelai (wondering what was taking so long with getting her the chocolate he’d promised to bring back from Hartford) and from a number he could only assume was the Hartford police station. Great. Also in the stress of having to call in an unattended minor, he’d actually forgotten to get the chocolate. Which was stupid and not important but also important to him. Whatever.

He called the police station back first. Mostly because he wasn’t an idiot. But a little bit because he didn’t want to tell Lorelai he’d forgotten, reasonable as it might have been.

“Hartford Police Department, this is Office Rio. Who’s calling?”

Luke slammed the door of his truck behind him and carefully carried the now empty tray of teas to his front door. “Luke Danes. I called in the unattended kid this afternoon. You called me.”

“Right,” said the voice on the phone. “You’re the jerk with the fake report.”

Luke dropped his keys. “What.”

“Sir, I’m going to need you to answer some questions about what you were doing approaching children in the park.”

Luke glared at the front door of his diner like it had personally offended him because, sadly, Officer Rio wasn’t available for that particular honor in person. “You’re telling me you think it’s perfectly fine for a kid to be sitting alone, unattended, in the middle of the day, for hours in a public park?”

“Her caregiver was with her the whole time, except for the ten minutes when you, Mr. Danes, chose to insert yourself into the situation.”

Luke snorted. “I watched that kid for an hour. No one was around.”

“You watched her for an hour?”

Shit shit shit shit shit.

He took a deep breath. Then he took another deep breath because the first one wasn’t cutting it. Cool it, Danes, he told himself. Do not start yelling at the police. Just, explain it clearly.

He tried not to think too hard about how his voice of reason sounded inordinately like Lorelai, sort of mixed with his Dad? It was probably best not to analyze that.

“Look, Officer,” he said, “I didn’t make a fake report and I wasn’t trying to ‘insert myself into the situation’ or whatever you said. I saw a kid sitting on a park bench alone and when I asked her why no one picked her up from school, she didn’t have a good answer, so I called you. Next time I’ll just walk right past and let the kid get murdered, is that better?”

Well, at least he hadn’t yelled.

Officer Rio did not sound amused. “Like I said, I’ll need you to come down to the station,” she said, “at your earliest convenience. The parents are pressing charges.”

Luke hung up the phone. Yep, that was definitely in his top three worst decisions ever.


	2. You've Been No Help At All

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “If you’re going back there,” she said, “at least let me go with you. You don’t know these people like I do. You don’t know their rich people ways.”
> 
> “I mean if you want to come?” Luke sounded confused and she couldn’t exactly blame him. Who volunteered to spend an hour and a half in the car so they could go to a police station?
> 
> “I don’t,” she said. “But you’re right. This kid clearly doesn’t have anyone standing up for her. And if you’re going to get in trouble for telling some jerks they’re doing a bad job raising their kid, I might as well help. I don’t think teenage me would forgive me if I didn’t.”

To be fair, there had been more than a few times in her teenage years when Lorelai had imagined it would come to this: twenty eight years old and sitting on the cold plastic chair of an underfunded police department.

But even her overly dramatic teenage self would have had difficulty coming up with how she got there.

*

“So, what you’re saying is that you didn’t get the chocolate.”

“Lorelai!” 

Luke’s angry voice coming through the phone was almost as funny as the look he got when she could actually see him this mad. All veiny and red faced and visibly repressing the urge to scream. Lorelai liked to think of herself as a good person, sure, but even sweet Rory had been able to point out that her habit of winding Luke up just to watch him untangle was bordering on cruel and unusual punishment.

Rory walked past her in the kitchen and mouthed, “Who is it?”

Lorelai mouthed back and motioned for Rory to walk closer. Then she grabbed a handful of gummy bears and danced out of Rory’s reach. It was going to be a lot harder to steal snacks from that kid when she got taller and her wingspan increased. On the phone, Luke was still fuming. Lorelai decided it was time for mercy.

“Luke. Calm down. The NSA can hear you ranting and you’re making them very nervous.”

“Lorelai, I’m serious,” came through the line. “I have no idea what I’m doing and I need you to be serious for one minute here.”

She sat down on the couch and pulled her feet under her. Luke did have his actual serious voice on. And the situation was pretty bad. 

No, screw pretty bad. The situation was awful.

“Look, I don’t think they’re really going to press charges. Her family probably just wants to make sure you’re out of the way, that you won’t be saying anything else against them. You said she was wearing a private school uniform?”

Luke grunted into the phone and Lorelai absently popped a few gummy bears in her mouth. “Then they probably have money. And if they have money then they’re the kind of people my parents are: totally used to getting their own way and very comfortable throwing lawyers at a problem until it resolves itself. They’re not going to sue you, they’re probably just going to make you retract your statement.”

“I’m not doing that,” he said. “I wasn’t lying. That kid was in danger or being neglected or whatever and I am not taking it back.”

“I know.”

“So what do we do?”

Lorelai worked very hard to keep that in. To keep in the little part of her that twitched when Luke referred to them as a “we”. The same little part that screamed when he made Rory birthday coffeecake, that thrilled for his failed attempts to hide a smile, that definitely refused to read anything into him offering to pick up chocolate for her in Hartford in the first place… She was not interested in being a “we” with Luke Danes. Nope.

Besides, why would Luke Danes want to be a “we” with her, anyway?

“We fight fire with fire. They’re rich jerks with lawyers? Well, we’re going to rich jerk lawyer them back.”

“Stop saying ‘jerk’, Mom!” Rory yelled from the other room.

“The situation calls for it, sweetie!”

“That Rory?” said Luke. “What does she think we should do?”

“Pretending that you did not just openly admit you prefer my twelve year old child’s advice over my own, I will go ask her,” said Lorelai, shoving the rest of the gummy bears in her mouth and walking over to Rory’s room.

Really, she was almost as furious about the situation as Luke was, but she had a lot more practice than he did at hiding the way rich people and their rich people solutions could drive a person completely crazy. And maybe she was a little more practical. Yes, Luke was the kind of guy who would call child services on a poor little rich kid. And yes, it killed her inside to imagine Rory in that kind of situation, abandoned and lonely because no one was looking out for her.

But Lorelai was a pragmatist at heart. Buried under fifty layers of sugary candy and a lot of band t shirts, she knew the way the world worked, and it pretty much never worked the way idealistic, kind, straightforward people like Lucas freaking Danes wanted it to.

“Hey kid,” she said, scooting next to Rory on the bed. Rory put down her book (and the bag of gummy bears) and took the phone as Lorelai handed it to her. “Luke wants your advice.”

Rory raised her eyebrows but gamely listened. As Luke explained the situation, Lorelai saw her face grow more pensive and upset, and for a faint flash, she hated Luke for making her daughter actually see the sadness in the world before she had to. But it was gone quickly and Rory, unsurprisingly, did have some thoughts to add to the conversation.

“I think you should get a lawyer,” she said. “You need to get a lawyer and you need to document everything that happened and you need to go right to the police and tell them that’s what you’re going to do.”

Luke then apparently said something and Rory smiled. “No, I just read a book about the criminal justice system last month and it had a lot of good information.”

Another pause. Lorelai stroked her hand over Rory’s bangs and marveled again at how such a perfect and kind and, well, large human had come out of her.

“I think you’re pretty great too, Luke. And you can’t go to jail. I’d starve to death.”

Rory handed the phone back to her and Lorelai laughed. “Harsh. Harsh but probably true. What do you think, Danes? You ready to lawyer up?”

“Geez, Lorelai, I mean, I guess? If I have to? But I really think I should just go down and explain myself to the officer at the station first.”

“You’re just saying that because you hate lawyers.”

“A little bit.”

Well, it was a fair point. Still, Lorelai started rummaging under the couch in the living room, reaching blindly for the rolodex she could have sworn she kicked under there last time she vacuumed. Which had been…two months ago? Three?

If Luke wasn’t going to call a lawyer then she was.

“If you’re going back there,” she said, “at least let me go with you. You don’t know these people like I do. You don’t know their rich people ways.”

“I mean if you want to come?” Luke sounded confused and she couldn’t exactly blame him. Who volunteered to spend an hour and a half in the car so they could go to a police station?

“I don’t,” she said. “But you’re right. This kid clearly doesn’t have anyone standing up for her. And if you’re going to get in trouble for telling some jerks they’re doing a bad job raising their kid, I might as well help. I don’t think teenage me would forgive me if I didn’t.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me until we get out of there and you’re not arrested.”

*

Leaving Rory with Sookie for the day had been harder than she expected. Not because of Rory’s ongoing campaign that she was old enough to stay home by herself, as it turned out, or when she discovered that she was still banned from the Kim’s home and would not be spending time with Lane. While both of those were usually issues of great contention, and Rory just didn’t understand that breaking a four hundred dollar antique nightstand was actually a fantastic reason to never be allowed somewhere again, the real problem had been how much Rory wanted to come with them.

“She’s probably scared!” Rory had said when Sookie got there and she realized she was absolutely definitely being left behind. “She needs someone her own age to explain what’s going on!”

“Honey,” Lorelai had said, “she’s probably not even at the station anymore. The officer said her parents came to pick her up right away.”

“Right away when the cops called them, sure.”

“Yes,” Lorelai sighed, “it’s unfair that her parents are doing this, but you have a test tomorrow and you need to study. Standing up for the rights of the oppressed and making new friends will have to wait for sometime that’s not a school night.”

Rory had still been ranting about freedom of expression and quoting Gandhi when she left.

Now they were here, stuck in the same police station she’d toured during an elementary school version of “scared straight”. The same station where she’d always imagined she would come when interrogated for some daring jewel heist that they’d obviously never be able to pin on her for sure. The same station where she’d come when, at eight, she’d run away from home and stupidly thought her parents couldn’t find her there.

“You have to admit, Mr. Danes, that your behavior was very suspicious.”

“No! I don’t!”

Lorelai put a hand on Luke’s shoulder to calm him down and took a long look at the officer interrogating them. Officer Rio was a stone faced woman of maybe forty, whose dark skin and hair made her stand out like a beacon in the aggressive whiteness of a Connecticut police station. She looked, and Lorelai really hoped she wasn’t projecting, just the tiniest bit like she wanted to be on Luke’s side.

They could work with that.

“I saw a kid who needed help. I mean, it’s the same thing I would have done if I saw Rory sitting somewhere by herself. She’s a smart kid but she’s too young to be on her own.”

Officer Rio raised an eyebrow and Lorelai wished she could master that move. Maybe she could practice?

“And Rory is…?”

“My daughter,” said Lorelai. “She’s twelve.”

Officer Rio made some notes in the file before looking back up, face just as neutral as before. “And you are…?”

“Lorelai? Gilmore?” she said, hating herself for the question. “Lorelai Gilmore. Age twenty eight, citizen of Stars Hollow and character witness, I guess.”

“Right.”

They sat in silence while Officer Rio wrote and Luke and Lorelai looked at each other helplessly. At least she’d been right that the child, “Paris” according to Luke, wasn’t at the station anymore. Hopefully she was home with her family and really really hopefully this would be the push they needed to, you know, not criminally neglect their daughter. 

“Mr. Danes,” said the officer, “you don’t have any prior offences and your story does seem to check out.” Lorelai and Luke breathed a sigh of relief as one. “But the parents are still pressing charges and frankly there’s nothing I can do about that. It’ll be up to the judge to decide if your intentions were malicious or not.”

“Come on,” Lorelai said, “there has to be something you can do!”

Officer Rio didn’t say anything, but Lorelai swore she could see a flicker of resentment, just for a moment. “It’s out of my hands,” she said, finally. “I will say that the Geller divorce is one of the nastier ones I’ve seen in my time here, but that’s not directly related to this case.”

“Divorce?” said Luke. “Her parents are getting divorced?”

“The child in question’s parents are currently separated. They have let us know that Paris was getting ice cream with her nanny after school when you approached her. She’s been picked up by a nanny representing one parent or the other after school for the past six months.”

Oof. Lorelai let out a low whistle. Separating parents and separate nannies? No wonder this kid was falling through the cracks. From the clench in Luke’s jaw, she could tell he was thinking the same thing.

“I’m sure the Geller divorce is unrelated to this incident, however,” said Officer Rio, closing the file and placing it in a drawer in her desk. “Just like I’m sure that you will of course keep all this confidential during your hearing.”

Luke looked about to say something possibly indiscreet, so Lorelai grabbed his arm and stood up sharply. “Thank you for your time, Officer,” she said. “You have been absolutely no help at all.”

And with that, they left.


End file.
